Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Santa Claus, Christmas carols, gifts, endless queues at the malls and the local
post offices, house decorations and more human
externalities! Christmas is here! Hohoho!! But, what does Christmas mean for us? Why "Merry Christmas"? Does Santa really exist? How could Christmas decoration both in houses and in retail stores affect our psychology? Marketers and psychologists are actually curious
human beings that have studied almost every aspect of human and consumer behavior, including Christmas psychology!

Santa Claus really exists?

Santa Claus,also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas or simply "Santa", is a mythical figure with legendary, historical and folkloric origins who, in many Western cultures, is said to bring gifts to the homes of the good children on December 24, the night before Christmas. Images of Santa Claus were further popularized through Haddon Sundblom’s depiction of him for The Coca-Cola Company’s Christmas advertising in the 1930s. The popularity of the image spawned urban legends that Santa Claus was invented by The Coca-Cola Company or that Santa wears red and white because they are the colors used to promote the Coca-Cola brand. Historically, Coca-Cola was not the first soft drink company to utilize the modern image of Santa Claus in its advertising: White Rock Beverages had already used a red and white Santa to sell mineral water in 1915 and then in advertisements for its ginger ale in 1923.

Kids believe in Santa Claus as a function of age. Kids are also more likely to believe if their parents encourage them to do so [Anderson & Prentice, 1994]. But it’s not clear that these beliefs are a sign of greater gullibility or even a greater interest in fantasy.

Actually, researchers found that a belief in Santa was unrelated to other measures of a child's interest in fantasy [Prentice, 1978]. And a recent series of experiments conducted at Harvard found that kids make important distinctions between beliefs in folkloric, fantasy characters and beliefs in other unseen, but scientifically-established, entities. Kids who professed to believe in Santa were nonetheless less certain about it than they were about the existence of oxygen or germs. Another set of experiments revealed that 4-year old kids don't invoke magical explanations for things that happen in the real world-not unless those things otherwise seem impossible [Rosengren & Hickling, 1994].

What happens when kids finally penetrate the veil and reject our fantasies? We might feel a little awkward or wistful. But the kids don’t appear to be heartbroken. When researchers questioned children who had stopped believing in Santa Claus, a milestone they reached around the age of 7, kids reported feeling pleased.

They had figured it out. They were enlightened now.

According to Anderson , it was THE PARENTS, NOT THE KIDS, who reported feeling a bit sad..

Why Merry Christmas?

Tim Kasser, an American psychologist, known for his work on materialism & Kennon Sheldon, professor of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, noticed 10 years ago that "More happiness was reported when family and religious experiences were especially salient, and lower well-being occurred when spending money and receiving gifts predominated. Engaging in environmentally conscious consumption practices also predicted a happier holiday, as did being older and male. In sum, the materialistic aspects of modern Christmas celebrations may undermine well-being, while family and spiritual activities may help people to feel more satisﬁed". Thus consumerism is not always the answer.

Christmas decoration

Werner & Brown [Journal of
Environmental Psychology, 1989] suggested that most people like
decorating their house for Christmas. One possible reason for this behavior
could be the desire to communicate friendliness and cohesiveness with
neighbors. Stimulus homes had been preselected to represent the four cells of a
two by two factorial design crossing the presence/absence of Christmas
decorations with the resident’s self-rated social contact with neighbors
(low/high). As expected, a main effect for the decorated factor indicated that
raters used Christmas decorations as a cue that the residents were friendly and
cohesive. Decoration interacted with sociability in a complex but interpretable way.

In the absence of Christmas decorations, raters accurately distinguished
between the homes of sociable and nonsocial residents; in open ended comments,
they attributed their impressions to the relatively more ‘open’ and ‘lived in’
look of the sociable residents’ homes. When Christmas decorations were present,
raters actually attributed greater sociability to the nonsocial residents,
citing a more open appearance as the basis for their judgments. The results
support the idea that residents can use their home’s exterior to communicate
attachment and possibly to integrate themselves into a neighborhood’s social
activities.

As regards retail stores and their Christmas decoration, the
following video, that explores current neuromarketing methods (measuring
stimuli and emotions to retail stores Christmas decoration), might shed light
on unconscious consumer decision-making processes:

Friday, December 13, 2013

This stage is the most time-consuming stage of the data mining process. Data is never clean
and in a form suitable for data mining. There are few typical data corruption problems in business databases such as duplication of the records, missing data fields, and presence of outliers. The preprocessing step involves integrating data from different sources and making
choices about representing or coding certain data fields that serve as inputs
to the data discovery stage. Such representation choices are needed because
certain fields may contain data at level of details not considered suitable for
the pattern discovery stage. For
example, it may be counterproductive to represent the actual date birth of each
customer to the data discovery stage. Instead, it may be better to group
customers into different age groups
and the chosen age groups should have
some significations for the research goal. It is important to remember that the preprocessing stage is
a crucial step.The representation choices
made at this stage have a great bearing on the kinds of the patterns that will
be discovered by the next stage of data discovery.

Patterns & Market Segmentation

Since there are so many ways we, human beings, are
different, it should not be surprising that we would differ in our needs for
automobiles. While there are many factors/variables that contribute to these
differences, we are considering the following factors for presenting our data
mining framework for the aforementioned example: vehicle image (Table 1), customer anticipated feelings (Table
2), and
demographics (such as age, sex, income, occupation, education etc). The
demographic factor plays an important role in the proposed analysis.

For example, consider how customer needs and preferences for
an automobile change as one moves demographically from college student to
management trainee; changes in income, occupation, and educational status each
contribute to a changing set of customer needs for a variety of products such
as an automobile. Many other variables can be incorporated as well.

There are mainly three different techniques to perform
market segmentation:

• Clustering:
this approach implies data grouping or partitioning

• Association:
this approach seeks to establish associative relationships between different
variables in the database

• Visualization:
this approach consists of providing the user with an immersive virtual reality
environment so that the user can move through this environment discovering
hidden relationships

Evaluation, Interpretation & Knowledge Discovery

To test how well the identified segments perform when
predicting preferences for new customers, two approaches can be considered:
train and test error estimation, and cross validation.

After the prediction accuracy is verified by one of the
above methods, the segments will be evaluated by the business people in order
to determine the usefulness of the segments. The evaluation of usefulness of
the market segments should be made by the business team with respect to the
following characteristics:

Substantiality: (segment size): The market segments
are large or profitable enough to serve.

Measurability: (segment profile): The market segments can be
identified and measured in terms of data already available. The segment
identification is very important: Segments that are based on meaningful
differences in customer needs but lack clear segment identification will fail
because the segment identity will not be known and an actionable marketing strategy
cannot be developed.

Actionability: Effective programs can be
designed for attracting and serving the segments. The market attractiveness
depends on market opportunity, competitive environment and market access.

If a segment fits the company’s objectives, the company must
decide whether it possesses the skills and resources needed to succeed in that
segment. If the company lacks the strengths needed to compete successfully in a
segment and cannot readily obtain them, it should not enter that segment. Even
if the company possesses the required strengths, it needs to employ skills and
resources superior to those of the competition in order to really win a market
segment. Once the company has decided what segments to enter, it must decide on
its market positioning strategy - on which positions to occupy in its chosen
segments[D. Raicu, DePaul University).ConclusionA theoretical, qualitative data mining framework for automatic gathering
of relevant and unbiased data was proposed. As a result, the initial investment
of producing a new product vehicle without being certain that it will be
satisfying people’s needs will be eliminated. Discovering a-priori segments of
people being interested in a certain product will also help the managers focus their advertising, promotion, and sales efforts on those categories of
people and thus, the time and costs will be significantly reduced.

Monday, December 02, 2013

Data mining can be defined as the process of "discovering patterns, meaning and insights in large datasets by using statistical and computational methods". Data mining works to analyze data stored in data warehouses that are used to store that data that is being analyzed. That particular data may come from all parts of business, from the production to the management. Managers also use data mining to decide upon marketing strategies for their product. They can use data to compare and contrast among competitors. Data mining interprets its data into real time analysis that can be used to increase sales, promote new product, or delete product that is not value-added to the company.HistoryData mining was born in the fields of Statistics and Computer Science (some might say Artificial Intelligence) and may also be referred as “Statistical Learning”. From a statistical perspective, most early and recent advances coming from Statistics have come from the Stanford Statistics department school of thoughts like Bradley Efron, Jerome H. Friedman, Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani. By the way, don’t forget that Stanford University is only 7 miles away from Google.

Data Mining FrameworkUsing data mining techniques, we, marketers, need to master an approach that will provide the decision makers with a-priory knowledge about customers’ preferences and needs. Since there are many different kinds of customers with different kinds of needs and preferences, a simple, solid approach is meant to be a tool for performing market segmentation: divide the total market, choose the best segments, and design strategies for profitability serving the chosen segments better than the company’s competitors do. The example developed below is described for product development in auto industry, but it can be successfully implemented for any other applications where it is necessary to find the correlations between the customer feelings or perceptions and the physical characteristics of a product. Yes, correlations, even through our statistics lenses. Yes,arithmophobia is over, my friend!

UnderstandingAny data mining application should start by understanding the business goals of the application since the blind application of data mining techniques without the requisite domain knowledge often leads to the discovery of irrelevant or meaningless patterns. In order to understand the target customers of an automotive company, it would be helpful to examine the relationships between the vehicle image/attributes and the customer emotional benefits that are tied to psychological needs, personality traits, and personal values. Thus, data mining can enable us to understand more completely how product specific characteristics relate to customer needs and the benefits a customer hopes to obtain from them. For instance, for many people, cars, homes, restaurants and vacations provide emotional benefits as well as rational benefits. However, for a wealthy person who has everything, the emotional benefits provided by status, prestige and superiority of an expensive automobile could outweigh rational benefits such as gas economy, lower maintenance and insurance costs, and resale value.

A target audience perhaps? "Free to do anything, in control, confident, sporty but with family."

Therefore, it will be beneficial to have a tool that will help us to respond to questions such as: What and how many of the personality attributes used to describe the customer might be shaped by the vehicle’s image? What kind of vehicle this customer or group of customers will buy?Data selectionThis step calls for targeting a database or selecting a subset of fields to be used for the data mining. The following issues should be considered in developing a plan for collecting data efficiently:

Evaluation of existing data sources

Specification of research approaches

Data gathering (contact methods, sampling plans and instruments)

The survey research is a simple, efficient method to collect data. One of the advantages of the survey research is flexibility because it can be used to obtain many different kinds of information in many different situations. Furthermore, depending on the survey design, it may also provide information quicker at a lower cost compared to manual processing. The survey may be in the form of a questionnaire that is very flexible as there are many ways to ask questions. In preparing the questionnaire, only the questions contributing to the research objectives will be asked. The questions may be closed-ended, as they include all possible answers. In designing the survey, we also make sure that the questions are simple, direct and arranged in a logical order. The first question should create interest if possible, and difficult or personal questions should be asked last so that respondents do not become defensive.

Instead of a traditional mail questionnaire, a more modern approach is the computer interviewing process, in which respondents sit down at a computer, read questions from a screen, and type their own answers into the computer at their own leisure. The beauty of this approach consists of its multiple benefits. As a first benefit, the respondents’ answers are automatically stored in a database. Furthermore, the survey is posted on the web and it can be accessible by an unlimited number of people. Filling out the survey becomes a non-time consuming task even for a busy person: the survey is on the web and it is accessible for anybody at any time; the submission of the completed survey requires only a ‘click on’ action executed by respondent, action possible through an interactive survey implementation. Third, the computers might be located at different locations such as auto shows, dealerships, or retail locations. The biggest benefit is the collection of more relevant data since people present at those locations are most likely willing to answer correctly to the questions because they are interested in automobiles. The approach can be implemented such that the data is gathered from numerous computers at different locations and stored in a unique and global database. As a fourth benefit, same survey format will be accessible to different categories of people: expert people (such as car designers) or people less familiar with auto domain characteristics. The large number of respondents and their diversity give more reliability on the results than small samples.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

When it comes to Agon, we refer to the
manner the comedy-like activities are performed in the daily life of the
Greeks. Agon refers to the formal convention according to which the struggle
between the characters should be scripted in order to supply the basis of the
action. Agon is a formal debate which takes place between the chief characters
in a Greek play, protagonist and antagonist, usually with the chorus acting as
judge.

We can easily spot
the motives suggested by Agon in all aspects of Greek society. Politics,
political actions and debates, social arenas, collectivistic activities, TV programs, etcetera are often organized like Agon.

A modern Greek debate that reminds us of Agon

Greece is a country
of spectacle, music and discussion and public critic. Greeks revel when
communicating in an expressive manner, while the level of noise tends to be
high in public spaces. People tend to congregate rather than be isolated from
one another. Bystanders do not mind becoming part of the action like the
audience of the ancient theater either. Thus, the externalities of Agon on
everyday Greek life and activities are more than obvious.

Chorus

The Chorus, though
it no longer told the story, was very important, for it set the atmosphere of
the play. The Chorus also served another purpose. Even today, in extreme
occasions, when the intensity of a situation (perceived as a lifestyle,
political, cultural change etc threat) becomes almost too great for any Greek
to bear, relief is often found in some very comic episode which is introduced
to slacken the tension. The Chorus executed this by a song of purest poetry.

Chorus, Lysistrata

In addition, the
mission of the Chorus was to preconceive the audience that the comedy is
acceptable and pleasant, in other terms that it was “safe”. Greeks are not at
all comfortable in ambiguous situations: the unforeseen is always there ready
to “lay an ambush”. In Greece, as in all high uncertainty avoidance societies,
bureaucracy, laws and rules are very important to make the world a safer place
to live in, even though they do not always work.

Greeks need to have
good and relaxing moments in their everyday life, chatting with colleagues,
enjoying a long meal or dancing with guests and friends. Due to their high
score in this dimension Greeks are very passionate and demonstrative people:
emotions are easily shown in their body language, small group behavior,
greeting behavior, even in their traditions. The Chorus respected these
exteriority characteristics and reproduced them during its actions, as a
micrography of the Greek society.

Last but not least,
in Thesmophoriazusae there are two Choruses. The doubling of the Chorus is a
phenomenon that is repeated both in The Frogs and in Lysistrata, where the two
choruses (Old Men and Old Women), appear on stage together after entering
separately. The interconnection of the two choruses with the direction of the
collective unconscious (as suggested by both Plato and Carl Jung) for both
ancient and modern Greeks is more than obvious. The Greek people still pay
attention to the elders, since they subconsciously form an archetype for wisdom
and respect. Masculinity and femininity social Greek models are also exposed
here; If we try to visualize the double Chorus process, it shows that Greek
women have the dynamics to be equal to men in terms of social activities, even
though, since ancient times, they often tended to stay in the house and define
their social status by satisfying their family needs. A controversy that still
exists in modern society.

Does the Greek woman still heterodefine her social role?

Conclusion

In short, a cultural metaphor represents a way to obtain new and deep insights into a group's or nation's culture. Cultural metaphors also provide a method for discussing cross-cultural issues, differences, and similarities in a collegial rather than a stereotypical and perhaps hostile fashion. In developing such insights, it is critical that the cross-cultural research be taken into consideration, and it is for this reason that both the dimensional perspective and the communication perspective should supplement cultural metaphors. Cultural metaphors represent only a starting point for understanding a culture; they are easy to use, but do require much thought to avoid inaccurate stereotyping; and they can be supplemented by other methods. Most importantly, cultural metaphors allow managers with limited time to gain some understanding of a group or nation's culture that they can apply quickly to the myriad problems that they face daily in international activities.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Within the field of
international marketing, cross-cultural consumer behavior, organization and management studies, Prof. Martin J. Gannonuses
cultural metaphors to describe, compare, and analyze national cultures
worldwide. In order to explore in-depth the unique cultural characteristics of
a nation, Gannon adopts an emic approach, focusing on the qualitative
examination of cultural symbols, practices, and institutions within their local
context.

For the existing
cross-cultural research into a country or a nation, the most influential one is
the three-dimensional approach developed by Kluckholn, Strodtbeck, Hall and
Hofstede. Their dimensions of culture, such as power distance, uncertainty
avoidance, individualism-collectivism, masculinity, time orientation constitute
a base upon which a majority of more recent studies have been built. Their
works have been invaluable in the area of cross-cultural studies. However,
their works are somewhat incomplete. Gannon noticed that the dimensional
approach had weaknesses like :

We should not look at a dimension separately,
since culture is a complex whole, and psychological phenomena are multiply
determined.

Gannon was based on
all four aforementioned dimensional approaches but also on the following
elements, which he suggests that should be carefully examined so that a the
protocol for a cultural metaphor is applied. Usually, three to seven of these
features of the metaphor, that include elements like below, are needed:

The Greek Comedy

Is the Greek Comedy a good cultural metaphor for Greece? Can it meet Gannon's criteria? Let's discover!

Humor & Komodia

The word komodia
means literally in Greek "party (-komos-) song (-odi-)" and, if this
is any indication of its origin, then comedy stems from revels (komoi) where
partiers (komastai) sang songs (odai) in which they teased, mocked and made
fools of spectators or public figures. Aristophanes used to target and mock
Kleon, a famous Athenian demagogue, through its plays. Satira, the modern word
of comedy, still dominant nowadays, is externalized in small-group discussions,
organized team activities, modern Greek theatres and mass media communication
channels, by teasing politicians, celebrities and in general influencing the
public, social and political behavior in Greece.

Apart from teasing
politicians and celebrities, in most Aristophanes comedies, Gods and goddesses
were personified abstractions who seldom appeared in his plays. That means,
comedies usually boosted the eternal need of the Greek people till today;
Greeks like to feel free. They do not like to be dictated by superior forces
and dislike the effects of any power mechanisms on their everyday life.

Prologue & Parodos

Introduction sets
the mood and gives some idea as to what the audience can expect to occur. In
Prologue - Parodos, the topic of discussion is set between the two debaters and
it is implied to the audience that the debate will be refereed. This part of
the comedy is representative of the ideas and the innovations that democracy
and freedom of speech has established, as a public and politics activity. This
concept is in fact the foundation of western civilization.

Furthermore, the
Parodos process has a direct association with modern Greek entertainment.
Parodos provided entertainment, accomplished with music, dance and extravagant
spectacle, which is still what modern Greeks seek for, as regards their leisure
pursuits and interests. In addition, the high noise levels produced during
Parodos can be characterized as a prelude of the aural space of modern Greeks,
who usually tolerate high noises as part of their routine.

Leisure interests and aural space in Greece.

Last but not least,
Parodos reflects how Greek relationships, both professional and private, are
early structured. Greeks tend to convey their feelings and thoughts, at least
partially at the beginning of a relationship, usually the other party has some
understanding of what will unfold, but it is only an imperfect preview, like
Parodos suggested, because the unexpected frequently occurs.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Neuromarketing is a relatively new field of marketing research which focuses on consumers'cognitive and affective response to marketing stimuli. Neuromarketing is actually a child of the eternal corporate need to sustain a decision by all possible means when the pressure is way over the possibility of a decident to fight failure. Google, Coca-Cola, BMW, Procter & Gamble, Motorola, CBS are a few of the companies who have experimented neuromarketing for the past years. We have previously referred to neuroscience and neuromarketing research here and here, yet academics are still sceptical when it comes to predicting the future of this new marketing method. As a matter of fact, when i asked Prof. Alan Wilson, University of Strathclyde, about neuromarketing research a couple of weeks ago, his cautious response brought me down to earth: "Well, can neuroscience and neuromarketing provide, in the long term, any unique additional value to marketeers, compared to other marketing methods?" Well, i think it's too early to know the answer, but, at least let's try to discover some opportunities that neuromarketing may provide for marketeers, if any.

TrustTrust is an issue which has been increasing in prominence within marketing. However, while consumer trust in brands and products is off course vital, marketing research has investigated trust on many other levels. Inter-organisational dealings such as joint ventures, strategic alliances and B2B buyer-seller dyads depend on mutual trust between parties. On one hand, consumer trust in marketing claims is crucial if they are to be believed, and ultimately lead to purchase behavior from consumers. The social utility of trust is clear when one considers that firms selling ‘fair trade’, ‘organic’, or other socially beneficial products must rely on consumer trust in their claims for success. Furthermore, in an organisational context, relationships depend on mutual trust between the parties. Without trust, opportunistic behavior dominates interactions, negating the possibility of long-term relationships between parties and again leading to a suboptimal situation for all. Marketing research has commonly conceptualized trust as more than a simple rational economic calculation, and it seems likely that neuroscientific methods can provide considerable insight into the nature and development of trust.

Neuroeconomic research has begun to investigate concepts of trust beyond rationality in recent times. Neuromarketing research can also be insightful to the investigation of trust. First and foremost, it is clear that, despite the centrality of trust to marketing relationships at a number of levels, controversies over the very nature of trust still exist. Neuroimaging is likely to offer considerable insight here. Research suggests that the caudate nucleus, which is often active when learning about stimuli–response relations, is involved in experimental games requiring some kind of trust. Yet is trust a simple response to a repeated positive stimulus, or something more? More interestingly, is the trust a buyer says they have in a seller, or a consumer in a product claim, similar in terms of the nature and location of brain activity to the trust that individual says they have in a close friend or family member? In particular, measuring both the spatial and temporal characteristics of neuronal activity may be important. For example does trust in an advertising claim or new business partner require increased information processing effort and time than trust in a long-term friend? This will have important implications as to the nature of trust. Furthermore, is consumer trust in claims relating to a product similar to a purchasing agent's trust in a contract with a supplier, and in turn is this of the same nature as the purchasing agent's trust in the individual sales executive they have negotiated with? Can trust be transferred from an organisation to a representative of that organisation? Finally, does trust evolve throughout the course of an inter-organisational relationship, or with continuing loyalty of a consumer to a single brand? Is trust ever truly existent in short-term marketing relationships? Exploring and understanding such questions about the nature of trust will then lead to greater ability to explore the antecedent factors to trust, and an ability to enhance firms' ability to build trust with customers and collaborators for mutually beneficial outcomes.PricingPricing is a key tool used by organisations in the positioning of their products. Marketing research has investigated the effects of price on consumers. Despite the amount of academic knowledge available, companies appear to use little of it when setting prices, leading to suboptimal situations for both consumers and firms. Understanding the psychology of pricing is of crucial importance if firms are to make optimal decisions and in fact has considerable utility in a broader sense. Pricing research has implications for how we understand information processing in any decision context where resources and information are scarce and costs must be weighed against benefits. Recent behavioral research for example has explored errors made by consumers when they process prices ending in 0.99 rather than a whole number -suggesting that individuals pay less attention to later numbers in a sequence. At this stage however, almost all pricing research is behavioral in nature, and relies on ‘assumptions’ about what actually occurs when individuals process pricing information.

In fact, pricing seems to lend itself almost perfectly to neuroimaging research. For example, simultaneously exploring the temporal and spatial nature of brain activity may help us understand exactly why prices such as ‘$4.99’ are perceived as significantly cheaper than those such as ‘$5.00’. Do individuals really ignore the final two digits, or are they processed in a different manner or at a later time - for example only when detailed comparative decisions must be made? Furthermore, do time or other pressures influence the processing of prices? Furthermore, neuroimaging looks likely to provide considerable insight into the nature of price information. Is the price of products a purely rational piece of information, or does it have emotional and/or reward-based connotations? It seems likely that the price of a basic product such as sugar is very different in nature from the price of a conspicuous product such as a Nike sports shoe, or a BMW sports car, which should be evidenced in changes in the location of brain activity when these prices are viewed alongside their associations (Source:UCLA). Research such as this will allow us not only to understand how prices are processed, but will afford insight into all situations where seemingly rational information is processed in decision-making situations.

Source: Forbes

Here is a recent pricing example of neuromarketing research: Kai-Markus Müller of Stuttgart-based The Neuromarketing Labs, using EEG brain wave measurement, gauged the emotional reaction of consumers to different prices for a small cup of coffee, which costs €1.80 ($2.45) at a Stuttgart Starbucks.The firm claims their results show that our brains reject prices that are too low or too high as being unrealistic, and says that the optimal price point for that small coffee in Stuttgart would be €2.40 ($3.25). Starbucks shareholders might like the idea that at least some of the firm’s products could be priced higher, but some caution is in order. For commodity items like coffee, lower prices tend to increase sales while higher prices discourage them. It would be quite unexpected for a higher price to increase unit sales for this type of product (Source:Forbes).

Conclusion

Trust and pricing were just two examples where neuromarketing/neuroimaging tools can assist marketeers and organizations further understand consumers. Neuromarketing research itself is constantly evolving, both in terms of technology as well as insights into exactly what activity and processes in various areas of the brain actually mean. As technology evolves, we will be able to measure frequency, temporal, and spatial characteristics of brain activity more accurately and in a complimentary fashion, potentially leading to new insight into what were previously well-accepted brain functions and areas of activity. I hope that neuromarketing will offer marketeers much insight into how humans behave during what is a large part of our modern lives.